Summary
“Bounty Lost” sidelines Clone Force 99 to focus on Omega, who people just can’t stop fighting over.
This recap of Star Wars: The Bad Batch season 1, episode 9, “Bounty Lost”, contains spoilers.
You’ll recall that last week’s episode of The Bad Batch ended on a bit of a cliffhanger, with special guest Cad Bane having taken Omega captive, and a badly wounded Crosshair chasing the rest of Clone Force 99 elsewhere. It’s only right, then, that “Bounty Lost” picks up from there, with a brief space battle and a moment of decision for the team as they’re forced to jump to hyperspace and leave their new ward in the care of Bane.
Bane is, predictably, being paid off by the Kaminoans, and there’s some bickering going on between them. It’s Taun We, who is apparently less sympathetic to Omega than some of the other Kaminoan higher-ups, who is sent to rendezvous with Bane at an abandoned facility on Bora Vio. The Kaminoans plan to retrieve some necessary genetic material from Omega and then terminate her, which is grim, but she obviously has something of an ally among them, even if the idea of her being “property” seems rather commonplace.
And then there’s the DNA thing. As Tech discovers, she has first-generation genetics — she’s a pure clone of Jango Fett, the omega to an alpha known as… Boba. She’s Boba Fett’s literal sister. Since Boba disappeared, Omega is the only living source of Jango Fett’s genetic material, which is obviously why she’s important to the Kaminoans. It probably also explains why she’s so smart and resourceful, as we see when she tricks Cad Bane’s droid Todo into allowing her to repair its detached leg and uses the opportunity to escape from captivity.
Omega’s subterfuge allows her to make a long-range transmission to the rest of the Bad Batch, but before she can describe her location too thoroughly, Bane catches her again. But things take a turn when Bane and Omega find Taun We dead, killed by Fennec Shand, who is evidently working for a different client and feels she has some rights to Omega’s bounty. And thus, The Bad Batch season 1, episode 9 delivers its obligatory action sequence, a cool-looking shootout and fistfight between Bane and Shand during which the payment Taun We brought along is lost and Omega is able to slip away. The facility’s smoky visuals lend something to this sequence, as do the snippets of the story that crop up between the fighting. Are those cloned Kaminoans in those big green vats? Is that what it looks like under Bane’s hat? Is Shand telling the truth about how the Kaminoan Prime Minister’s plans for Omega are much worse than what she could do to her?
It seems in “Bounty Lost” that Shand has been hired to protect Omega, though you can forgive Omega for thinking the opposite. Either way, in all the commotion, Omega is able to get away in a pod that doesn’t make it very far before it runs out of power. When the craft pulls to a stop and the access hatch opens, though, it’s Wrecker’s moony head that peers down at her. She has been rescued, finally, but that doesn’t do much to assuage her concerns about why the Kaminoans are after her. Hunter is forced to tell her that she’s different. Meanwhile, Shand is able to sabotage Bane’s ship so he’s unable to give chase. We also see who hired her for this job — the sympathetic Kaminoan whose name I didn’t catch earlier! Predictable, but sweet, all the same.
Star Wars: The Bad Batch season 1, episode 9 ends with a nice moment between Hunter and Omega in which he promises that she’ll never have to go back to Kamino. I hope he can keep that promise.
